To be fair, all things being equal, the fact of the matter is there are no easy answers. The jury is out on this one, but basically the nation has lost its mojo. Moving forward, we need to leave no stone unturned in seeking out that one-size-fits-all-solution. Let’s wake up and smell the coffee, tighten the nation’s belts, and avoid airing our dirty linen in public. Actions speak louder than words. Everyone has their cross to bear. Let me be absolutely open and honest with you, we are moving the goal-posts, reinventing the wheel, thinking outside the box, so that the shoe is – literally – on the other foot. A week is a long time in politics.
Sound familiar?
Yes indeed, a week is a very long time in politics when none of us has a notion what our elected politicians are blathering on about, because so many speak in borrowed regurgitated clichés, rather than original oratory. The word cliché originates from a time-saving method in the 19th Century French printing industry in which word combinations on blocks were re-used to save time, which is kinda similar to what’s happening in the 21st Century. Are we simply too lazy to be innovative in our speech? Are our creative juices so dried up that we resort to recycled clichés? A cliché is an expression, or idea, which inevitably becomes overused, so much so that clichés risk losing their original meaning, becoming somewhat irritating, and arguably meaningless.
We have all heard sports pundits talking about ‘a game of two halves’, ’taking it one game at a time’, ‘giving it 110%’, or my favourite – “What this team need is more balls in the net”. Well yeah – hello – doesn’t every team? And remember, there is no ‘i’ in ’team’.
I admit to having a few favourite clichés, but I like to think I use them sparingly. I love the description of a disgruntled person as having ‘a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp’, or a very busy person as being ‘as busy as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest’.
Of course the music business and record industry are similarly awash with clichés. In the studio, songs are described as being ‘in the pocket’, bands ‘go the extra mile’ and reach ’the tipping point’, while managers or agencies are ‘all ears’, but yet they frequently ‘drop the ball’. An agent, who spoke like a textbook, once told me “I’m feeling the texture and fabric of what you’re saying to me James, I’m hearing you but I’m not listening to you”. Nice.
Clichés can be a cop-out, unless perhaps they are new and inventive. Maybe we can try to re-invent clichés? When something is glaringly obvious, instead of perhaps asking “Is the Pope a Catholic?”, how about exercising a little originality and offering alternatives such as “Are prostitutes virgins?” or “Have tenors brains?”. Shouldn’t writing be more creative? Shouldn’t public speaking and sports punditry be more original? And while we’re at it, let’s stop ‘basically’ mis-using and ‘literally’ over-using.
It’s possibly passable for guests on the Jeremy Kyle Show to spew out clichés and say “To be honest, at the end of the day beauty is only skin deep. It’s what’s on the inside that counts, we need to build a bridge and get over it”. But anyone with an ounce of education should surely strive to speak in a more original, creative and individual way. Let’s all become individualistic wordsmiths. But even great political orators talk of ‘putting boots on the ground’, ‘no-brainers’, ‘elephants in the room’, ‘doing what it says on the tin’, and then there is that most irritating and patronising of all clichés – ‘it is what it is’.
And are we seeing the dawn of 21st Century clichés such as ’24/7′, ‘LOL’, ‘OMG’, ‘LMAO’, ‘being totes over it’, and ‘#hashtag’? Please say no, but I fear we are skating on thin ice. Doh!
Hey, hold your horses, don’t shoot the messenger. Hopefully I’m preaching to the converted, and not cutting off my nose to spite my face. At the end of the day, by the same token in one fell swoop you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. I believe in taking the bull by the horns, calling a spade a spade and not beating about the bush – so I’m taking a rain-check on clichés.
